The Conjuring: Last Rites

After more than a decade of haunted houses, demonic dolls, and Patrick Wilson’s brow furrowing on command, The Conjuring: Last Rites closes the case file on Ed and Lorraine Warren with the kind of reverent schmaltz usually reserved for retirement tributes at the local parish. Michael Chaves, returning from The Devil Made Me Do It, guides this finale less like a horror film and more like a family reunion with ghosts invited. If Fast & Furious has become the globe-trotting telenovela of action cinema, then The Conjuring has quietly transformed into horror’s most conservative franchise, half sermon, half séance, always eager to bless a cookout before the devil arrives.

The film sets its stage in 1986, when the Warrens—still embodied with square-jawed sincerity by Wilson and Vera Farmiga—are beginning to show wear. Ed’s ticker is acting up, Lorraine’s visions are draining her, and even their lecture audiences now heckle them with Ghostbusters jokes. Still, the franchise that has leaned on “based on a true story” as both sales pitch and security blanket isn’t about to let its heroes fade quietly. Instead, Last Rites braids together two storylines: the Smurl family, whose Pennsylvania home is plagued by an antique mirror that doubles as a hell portal, and Judy Warren (Mia Tomlinson), now grown and engaged to ex-cop Tony (Ben Hardy), but still haunted by childhood visions.

That’s the theory, anyway. In practice, both halves stumble over each other like a Brady Bunch reunion trapped in a haunted maze. The Smurls are sketched with such sitcom density, bickering siblings, harried parents, too many people in one creaky house, that the scares never find oxygen. Judy, meanwhile, spends much of the film chanting a nursery-rhyme mantra and insisting her hallucinations aren’t real, despite growing up in a literal vault of cursed tchotchkes. For a movie ostensibly about demons, the scarier specters turn out to be adult responsibilities: marriage, mortality, and the slow betrayal of middle-aged knees.

Chaves leans heavily on callbacks to the series’ earlier, stronger entries. Mirrors ripple, toys twitch, Bonnie Aarons’ demonic mug pops up with suspicious frequency, and of course Annabelle makes her contractual cameo. These aren’t so much set-pieces as Easter eggs, designed to prod the memory of audiences who might remember when James Wan staged scares with genuine rhythm and dread. Wan’s original 2013 Conjuring wasn’t revolutionary, but it was effective: sweaty-palmed fundamentals delivered with panache. By comparison, Last Rites feels like a museum tour of horror clichés, each prop labeled “Do Not Touch.”

The Warrens’ advancing age could have been the one fresh wrinkle, ghostbusters confronting their own mortality rather than someone else’s. Wilson gamely slips into dad-joke mode, tossing off “too old for this” asides between wheezes, while Farmiga lends solemnity to Lorraine’s weary clairvoyance. But the script keeps shuttling between side plots, Judy and Tony’s engagement jitters, a rivalry between Smurl daughters, Father Gordon’s sidebar advice, even an inexplicable ping-pong game, until the Warrens themselves feel like guests of honor at their own farewell party. When they finally arrive at the Smurl house, the climax plays less like a battle with evil than a sepia-tinted victory lap, complete with a wedding sequence that all but hoists the Warrens’ demonologist jerseys into the rafters.

Horror franchises often mutate into camp in their later years, and Last Rites occasionally winks in that direction. The sight of Ed and Lorraine being heckled about never getting slimed, or the image of Annabelle watching a wedding with moist eyes, could have tipped this series into the meta-comedy it secretly deserves. But Chaves plays it straight, and so the film lands in the uncanny valley between satire and sanctity: too earnest to be self-aware, too derivative to be frightening.

Ultimately, The Conjuring: Last Rites doesn’t exorcise the franchise’s demons so much as bless them with holy water and tuck them into bed. For diehards, it’s a warm curtain call with a few shivers attached. For everyone else, it’s dad-rock horror: comforting, predictable, and just a little embarrassing to blast in 2025; a year that has given us 28 Years Later and Weapons. The Warrens’ legacy may endure, but this send-off proves that sometimes the scariest thing isn’t what goes bump in the night, it’s watching a once-lively franchise shuffle toward the light.

2.5/5